How ReSound Refreshed their Relief App with Real Customers

The Case: ReSound

As part of GN Hearing, ReSound strives to develop better solutions that help people rediscover hearing so they can live rich, active and fulfilling lives. Active in more than 80 countries, ReSound has a strong focus in research and development, making sure that their solutions are addressing real needs in the market. One solution is their Relief app, which helps those who suffer from tinnitus manage their symptoms.

The Challenge

As one of the leading apps for relieving and managing tinnitus, maintaining and improving the Relief app is a priority for ReSound. Since the app was launched, it has gained popularity in the app store, and ReSound wanted to explore its potential for further growth. While their current user base was solid, ReSound wanted to better understand the app’s perceived value as well as the user experience of first discovering and exploring the app after the initial download.

The first challenge was to get an overall better understanding of people with tinnitus. The Relief product development team used a number of research methods to collect data including behavioral analytics, app reviews, and in-app surveys. However, all of these methods only showed data on one segment of people: those already using the app.

“We actually tried to do it ourselves,” said Juan Jose Romano, Product Manager at ReSound. “We tried to reach out to people who have tinnitus but have not used our app. And that was very, very difficult, especially because tinnitus is a medical condition that not a lot of people are aware of. So recruiting the right respondents was very time consuming and we ended up getting only a few of them. The cost-benefit was quite high.”

That is when ReSound contacted UserTribe.

“We actually tried to do it ourselves…And that was very, very difficult.”

— Juan Jose Romano, Product Manager at ReSound

“The whole process from ‘I have an idea, can you help me?’ to actually getting results and insights we can act upon was really smooth. It would have taken us ages to do that.”

— Juan Jose Romano, Product Manager at ReSound

The Opportunity

Working with the Relief team, we designed a study that would target people with varying degrees of tinnitus in the USA who are not current users of the Relief app. The study focused on different features within the app and asked participants to explore the app while giving feedback on what they found valuable and most useful. Ultimately, we collected video and audio data from over 30 qualified participants.

Within a week, our anthropologists had reviewed all of the raw footage and extracted key insights and patterns. The results we found helped validate many of the Relief product development team’s original hypotheses. They also highlighted some areas of concern for them to focus on and address before re-launching the app.

“With UserTribe it was much more time efficient,” said Juan Jose, after receiving the final report. “With their help, were able to connect with more than 30 people with different degrees of tinnitus and get the most valuable insights without having to listen to the whole 1-2 hour conversations. The whole process was very straightforward and simple: we just had a dialogue with UserTribe to decide how the test would be, and then, a week later, they provided us with a document with all the insights so we could immediately act upon them. It saved us a lot of time on recruiting, interviewing, listening to and analyzing the conversations.”

The Result

Overall, the Relief team was glad to have a clearer understanding of the daily lives of people living with tinnitus, outside of their app. Our work was able to integrate smoothly into their development process, empowering their decision-making without delaying their timeline. Now, the Relief product development team is working to implement these insights into their app redesign.

“The conclusions were really good – very valuable,” said Juan Jose. “The whole process from ‘I have an idea, can you help me?’ to actually getting results and insights we can act upon was really smooth. It would have taken us ages to do that.”

As development continues, the Relief team plans to do further user studies post-launch, bringing UserTribe along to help collect data from hard-to-find user segments.